Amazon At Last

After five days of looking for woodstars, it is clear that we are here at the wrong time of year.  We have seen several males visiting flowers, but they aren’t defending territories or showing any interest in the nearby females.  Since we have no hope of getting data at this point, we decided to blow off a day and go visit the lowland rainforest.  The Amazon jungle starts a few thousand feet below our field site and stretches across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.  It is so vast that referring to it as a single entity doesn’t make sense because it is made up of so many different forest types.  Still, “the Amazon” has been in my dreams for as long as I can remember and this was my first chance to set foot in it. 

On the recommendation of Willan, our Ecuadorian guide, we drove down to a park called Jatun Sacha on the banks of the Napo River.  Five minutes in the forest reminded me that I am a lousy tropical biologist.  I couldn’t really tell you the difference between this forest and the lowland rainforest in Panama that I have worked in before.  At times like these I really wish I was a better botanist so I could appreciate the structure and diversity of what is actually in front of me.  To be fair, 11am is the worst time to visit a tropical rainforest.  The heat of the day gets the cicadas all riled up, but just about everything else layes low and stays out of sight.  The scuttling, slithering creatures that I am most excited about don’t come out until after dark and we didn’t have that much time to spend.

We opted for a short hike to an observation tower that would give us a nice view of the canopy.  Canopy towers come in all shapes and sizes in the tropics but this one was by far the most questionable I have seen.  Our scrappy old harnesses and rusty carabiners offered little comfort, especially when the 120ft tower started swaying in the breeze.  There was a time when looking down from that height would have been an unpleasant experience.  Fortunately, a summer spent climbing giant sequoia trees has changed that. 

We only had a couple of hours to spend in the forest before grabbing lunch in a nearby town and retreating back to the refreshing climate of the highlands.  Not exactly what I had envisioned for an Amazon experience, but if my plans for next summer come through, I will have all the Amazon I can handle…

Chris Clark checking out the view from the canopy tower in the Jatun Sacha Biological Reserve